Stomp the Butterfly's Wings to Dust
by Kisuru-chan
Summary: The Sakurazukamori was right all along. Subaru doesn't notice until reality slaps him in the face and he can't stand it anymore. He's closer to the Sakurazukamori than ever. He is perfectly okay with that. Subaru gives up. However, he will be an onmyouji of his own accord. Half a case fic and half an introspection piece.


**A/N:** Written as a Yuletide 2017 exchange gift for issen4.

-()-

It wasn't until a sweltering day in July three years after the conclusion of the bet that Subaru finally realized the truth of the world around him.

Seishirou's cryptic words about destruction and downfall were right. He had been right all along;

Tokyo was headed on a highway crash to disaster. It was a wasteland on the brink of collapsing. There was nothing anyone could do to prevent the chaos and corruption from eating upon itself and feeding the wild beast that inhabited the city's underbelly.

Mind you, however, Subaru did not arrive to this conclusion lightly. It was not a dawning revelation that submerged his world in nuanced meanings. It certainly was not a spectacular light of justice.

Neither did the realization ride on the wings of pride or a need to protect. Symbols of like the Tokyo Tower or the myriad of government buildings passed him every single day. The heart and soul of what those buildings represented in the greater scheme should have given him a nationalistic prayer. Nonetheless, he felt nothing upon seeing them.

The city had big ambitions that would never be fulfilled. The politicians frying each other for wealth, power, and fame knew that better than anyone. It was a never ending cycle. No one ever won.

In turn, interactions with the city's people shaped his vision of the landscape around him. This firm outlook gradually dragged out the skip in his step, made his heart contract each time he was opposed with them.

No, the reason he couldn't continue as an onmyouji any longer was quite basic. It was a mix of hope, a wish, and a dash of excruciating internal agony.

Subaru was tired.

-()-

Mr. Ishida was the CEO of a large snack company. From the story he gave, he was in constant fights with other snacks companies, always fighting to come out on top. Sending in people for recipes or working to sabotage their product. Making people believe that this-or-that would befall them if they ate that one product and the other one was better.

The routine was this: someone threw a spell, the next person was attacked and in rebuttal attacked back, and a savage fight broke out between them.

But this time one person wasn't targeted. The people eating Mr. Ishida's product had been cursed and killed. In retaliation, Mr. Ishida had taken the law into his own hands and sent curses at a shadowy figure he didn't even know. The need to return fire on whoever it had been had changed him and furthered his greed to destroy his competition.

"And I'm glad you're here," Mr. Ishida told him the one night the curses had gotten out of control, "because I need to take whoever this Is down. Not for myself, but for victims of this senseless act!"

That was what Subaru understand, anyway. Mr. Ishida didn't tell him that much. But the way his voice growled when he mentioned the outside force made it all too apparent. The way he scowled and looked so, so satisfied that he would rise to the top after Subaru helped him stop his enemy's plots. The way he said "victims" had no warmth to it the way Seishirou's hadn't when he had broken his arm; he didn't have any sympathy for them but his wealth.

"Are you certain we're safe here?" Mr. Ishida asked him. He paced the office, frown engraved in his cheeks, pensively looking out the window.

"I have set up all the precautionary measures," Subaru replied. The wards set at the perfect angles around the room hummed. "I'll be able to catch the sakanagi when it arrives. Please don't interfere."

And he did. Subaru took care of Mr. Ishida's burden and repelled it. He cast a spell back to his enemy that would give him his own sakanagi to deal with eventually. Subaru doubted his enemy would attack Mr. Ishida in the near future; sometimes people were craftier than the bulk that didn't hide their footprints. Tracking the trace of such spells was usually easier, but in the magical playground that was Tokyo, not everyone could be rightfully caught. That was standard job protocol. Still, he couldn't forget that Mr. Ishida himself had been part instigator in it.

"Please refrain from using any curses, Ishida-san," Subaru reminded him firmly. He clenched the curse book in his hands, ready to take another case of suffering back home and add it to his overpacked shelf. "I'm telling you this for your safety, as well your company's health and employees. Being on the receiving end of such spells is not what you want."

"As you wish, Sumeragi-san," Ishida said with conviction and a wide business-only smile.

But the funny thing about words that were lies always meant they had something else attached. The physical implications weren't always noticeable. Subaru had just seen it often enough to realize the cues; Seishirou had awoken his perceptions to such lies through the teeth. It was a reassurance that meant little to nothing in the name of greed. Mr. Ishida's mouth quirked to the side and Subaru knew he would be tossed in a body bag far too soon.

It wasn't enough to win. He had his opening, and he wanted to take it. He wanted no future incidents.

When he did receive the call in the morning three days later, it was a voice message screaming for help. The next one was from police headquarters.

Subaru trekked out. The clouds were heavy and grey and Tokyo would be under shower soon. But the spray of blood on Mr. Ishida's office walls was what doused his soul with a bitterness that he had never experienced in all his time as an onmyouji.

Locking eyes with him, a police officer nodded at the corpse. Subaru nodded back. The lifeless eyes glared at him accusingly, another curse book held between his fingertips. The mangled body had traces of sakanagi; burns and leaking wounds.

The police officer opened his mouth to speak, but Subaru simply pulled out a crisp white piece of paper from a folder and handed him his report. He had written it the three nights ago based on pure prediction. Bowing, he stalked straight back out of the building. Not once did he look back no matter how many times they screamed out his name.

The onslaught of rain from the Tokyo skyline showered him like an old friend on the street and fell, fell, fell. The rain soaked his skin. The July breeze warmed his face and sent shockwaves to his soul.

Subaru felt purified.

-()-

Not always would he be prepared for it. The shadow crept up on him and stole his breath. It clawed at his body and overpowered him and inhabited every inch of his being that wasn't already aching with remorse.

At the bare minimum he had to bring water to the bedside. Food was optional. Telling the neighbors that they shouldn't worry if he refused to leave his apartment for a day or so depending on the severity of the price of his spells was something that was not negotiable. Neighbors would come knocking, and Subaru frankly didn't want to hear the knocking.

He usually laid there and accepted it. He allowed the punishment and debt that should be someone else's into his home, his soul, his every nerve to protect the client who was happily out there living their life.

When the sakanagi hit, he just wanted to be.

He endured the sakanagi. Without preamble it was painful, stabbing, throbbing, many things that could not easily be described. No one wanted to endure this, so he took it upon himself. He sat nights trying to take in the pain from the backlash because it was better that he felt it than the people around him.

They said that was why empathy came naturally to him. He knew the level of their pain; their troubles were his and he never left any client behind.

But was it, really? Did it make the people around him understand the depth to their wrongdoings if he burdened their suffering on his own shoulders?

And then he wondered on those dark nights when his eyes burned and he shivered and gripped at the sweat-stained sheets under his head…. Was this why the Sakurazukamori's way to eliminate it before it became an issue for the city was more efficient? Was that another form of kindness of its own?

Subaru didn't know. His thoughts would run off the tracks after running in loops around that question. The weight of life and death was something no one else had to bare. In a way, he envied Seishirou for whatever emotionless pit he had climbed out of, or whoever call to his own duty kept him aligned.

He was glad for the first time that Hokuto couldn't see his face or him lying there. She would take of him and he would let her own his problem, too. But he could see another whole view of it. It wasn't because he wasn't taking care of himself. He had opened his eyes to the truth, and she would be scared to see the line to his mouth that depicted his lowkey insanity, the responsibility she hadn't been subject to harbor for her life. It was the life that he was supposed to live for the foreseeable future.

He didn't want that life.

He could not handle it.

Hadn't that been her the opposite of her wishes?

Everything would blur and morph and shift. The tears in his eyes would distort the world before his eyes, and he wouldn't know what he thought.

Subaru was anything besides a role model, or an idol that onmyouji could aspire to be. He had never been fit for the role in the first place. He had only stored that knowledge in the back of his mind, locked away tightly, so tightly that nobody else could reach it and dismantle the core of his person.

Hokuto would have been infinitely times more suited to be head should she had been gifted the abilities he had been. She didn't accept that the world wasn't what she wanted it to be; she made the world what she wanted it to be simply on her force of willpower.

She hadn't done _everything_ for him, but she had done just about so he wouldn't be a wreck. She had reminded him not fall prey exhaustion.

 _"It's like… you aren't alive," she had scolded him. "That's why I try to help you decide who you are."  
_  
Nothing had been right since the Sakurazukamori had left. Subaru, on the other hand, couldn't look at anything with blindfolded innocence.

He had to accept it, because his life had become it.

So, the pain made him think outside the box. He would imagine her standing near him. Subaru would be too distracted to think vividly of it. Her image would flitter across the darkened room, but it was everything to just imagine her standing there.

"Subaru," she would whisper. The tears would flood to her eyes, and she would stare at him as they dripped down her face and landed on the hands that held his shoulders. "You can't mean you want to give up. You _can't_. Don't you remember who we are? Don't you remember who I know you are?"

Her queries meant less the more she dug deeper.

Why was being born into a noble family that special?

Who in the laundry list of nameless faces and long descriptions was he giving up on in the long run?

In a country with difficult working conditions, no one was safe. He didn't need validation or a replacement. Couldn't the city take care of itself and accept fate?

Their family name was smudged in dirt, and the self-deprecation had started before the Sakurazukamori.

Without simple love, kindness, and self-control… With the world so heavily entrenched in darkness and selfishness and unbridled entitlement….

The universe didn't needed his help if it was going to spit him back out into the fire to this magnitude.

The floor under his feet would quake. Where he should put his feet, or where he should step… Subaru would fall from the dizziness in those sakanagi-induced moments. Did he have a place to go that appreciated actually he stood for?

Who was Sumeragi Subaru, anyway?

An onmyouji? Was he stuck between being a man and a naïve boy? A neglectful brother? The person who had a shoulder to cry on? Or the granite statue that never moved because he was prey for a man who had ruined the foundations of his heart?

Worst of the lot, could Subaru be nothing at all?

-()-

For centuries the esteemed Sumeragi family had upheld the spiritual integrity of Tokyo. It had not stopped there, either. Their achievements branched out to the old capital in Kyoto and, by extension, the entirety of Japan in the name of the larger picture.

Everything was about upholding reputation and tradition that Subaru constantly questioned in the darkest corners of his heart on a daily basis.

Why did they need him? What was his purpose?

He was the 13th heir of the legendary Sumeragi family, Sumeragi Subaru, the man that should extend his family's roots into the future. His family deserved a head that fit into his role. Yet Subaru indubitably had smudged his name in betrayal.

There were onmyouji elsewhere protecting Japan. Dare he said, he was an idol they revered. Subaru had all the answers, the recognition, the vast eyes on him to be the leading expert on human-spirit negotiations. It astounded him that people truly believed that on such a shallow basis; they didn't grasp his strengths or weaknesses one bit.

The other onmyouji families would leap at the chance to prove themselves over the Sumeragi namesake. They could take over if need be. It would never be the same—the Sumeragi were a cut above the rest. But Subaru would not mind seeing their progress on an outside looking in perspective.

Isn't that what the Sakurazukamori did daily?

Of course he realized that other people didn't have the qualifications or abilities he had. His own sister hadn't had them, either. But he wasn't positive any onmyouji could handle all problems. It would be the little lead-ins to frustration, the numerous people that used spells incorrectly and drew curses, people that refused to listen to him time after time and could not properly follow directions… the repeat offenders that never learned and let vengeance slaughter them …

Subaru believed that people were misguided and fell off the right track. Rule-breakers needed to return to the light. On another day, they would realize their mistakes even if they had to rebuild their life.

But where did he draw the line once and for all?

There were a lot of those people that dredged up ghosts or the curses that should be trapped in books. They shouldn't look for those things, but they did anyway, angry and resolute in their destruction. Doing so was the way of things. After the bet's conclusion he had felt that exact way, but Subaru alone carried the immense pressure of that.

Sometimes when he tried to seek them out, they evaded him and slipped through the cracks.

He was supposed to magically organize everyone's problems like a giant yellow jigsaw puzzle piece by piece. It was too bright to navigate, too painful, and they did not one thing about it for themselves.

Family generational grudge cases especially had him coming back to do things that he was sure his own grandmother might have fixed years ago. It was a never ending cycle that never grinded to a half.

 _"Your relative, the powerful Lady Sumeragi—" the woman had told him several months ago, showing him a faded polaroid picture, "helped my mother. But we are both on bad terms with that family again…."_

It turned out that she had cast a curse and blamed the other family for the problems that had resulted. _  
_  
Who was he saving? Why did they break what his family had already touched and revert it back?

Why was he driving himself into the ground for them, especially after the kindness and gentleness he had given the world? Did it pay off to have compassion?

All of it, crushed like a butterfly's wings to dust.

-()-

"I heard that your client died, Subaru-san."

The phone had shrilled for days. He didn't know how many exact days. He had done anything else except look at the calendar on the kitchenette wall marked with upcoming appointments in bolded red ink.

"And you have not attended clients following that incident. As I have heard, you also have not spoken to the police or given any direct notice of events."

Subaru had never counted the sheer number of hats Hokuto had crafted for him, but he knew the answer now. Thirty-three hats plus the half-finished one with a needle still stuck in the wide brim. It might have been her last attempted creation. Those hats didn't even count the old ones wedged in a closet at the family estate collecting a shelf full of dust.

"Yes," he acknowledged her, although his tone was respectable compared to his actions. He watched the gleam of moonlight peak and wane on the balcony window washing out the rest of Tokyo's glittering skyline. He had no excuses to efface the seriousness of the issue, simply the raw truth.

It was peculiar on closer inspection. Subaru had expected the phone to shake in his hand. He had expected a rockslide would blast through his ceiling and smother him to death. Most importantly, he had thought he would feel concern or annoyance that he had to make this stance and proclaim that he was done with the challenges that opposed his life.

Such would be childish predictions, wouldn't they? He wasn't the same person he had been. He wasn't doing this because making a show out of his own struggles. Everyone had struggles. Reality's limits were far clearer than they had ever been, and Subaru's ambitions were crystal clear to him.

He wasn't scared. He was listless, but his priorities were in order. Duty and personal obligations weren't pulling him in both directions until he lost both arms.

He hadn't seen his grandmother since he had seen the total damage the Sakurazukamori had done. He had seen her, a blur accompanied by the metal of a wheelchair and frown worse than a weapon. Above all, she was the person who would least understand and understand because she had been right there.

The silence on the other side of the line was utterly deafening. He took a calm, noiseless breath.

"As the 13th head of the Sumeragi clan, I, Sumeragi Subaru, hereby renounce our ties to Tokyo." The words were flat, monotone. Saying it aloud wasn't as beautiful as he had first imagined. Something wasn't sweet enough on his tongue, and a craving stirred deep within his chest. Not just Tokyo. It had to be the bombshell that shook the country and let the ripples of his choice spread. "To all of Japan."

There may have been a gasp in the moment he heard nothing. It was not audible, but he heard it.

"Is this truly what this has come to?"

The sound of Hokuto's words vanished in his head. There was a bit of defeat in her strong tone, the edges of it frayed and fringed, having guessed this.  
She had been his predecessor and Subaru hadn't expected her to miss the beats from his actions.

"Subaru-san," Lady Sumeragi said, calculating but deliberate. Her voice was everything practical that Subaru couldn't identify with, and the sound grated in his ears. She would want to uphold the legacy the Sumeragi family had endowed to Japan. "You want to throw hundreds of years' worth of tradition away."

"I know, Grandmother," Subaru told her. It took every shred of patience from his bones to his brain not to let himself waver. But he couldn't keep up with her ideals, or the transactions so many generations ago that had cemented his life in stone. "I am aware."

Silence dinged over the phone line. He could hear static and the steady rhythm of her harsh breath.

Perhaps she was processing the shock of it. It was a weight and shame to their enemy, their allies, than ever before. The resistance would be coming, but he had his mind aimed for the prize, and he knew that she took his words as Sumeragi head seriously.

"The sacrifices that have been made should be—"

"Don't," Subaru commanded. Immediately, he realized how sharp and presumptuous his words were. He was about to backtrack to formalities, but he remembered who he was then, and he took solace in it. "We will never forget the sacrifices. We will find another path. Good night, Grandmother."

The phone dropped in the cradle. He walked to the window and peered out. Tokyo pulsed below him as millions of small figures dotted the streets. Shadows didn't fall from the moon and he didn't look for them.

Subaru closed the curtain.

-()-

Regular humans weren't equip to fight supernatural presences. Deep down, Subaru didn't want anyone to get hurt, but he realistically knew people would get hurt. He knew that they would get hurt over and over again. As time progressed, they would try to figure out the perfect formula to survive. That formula would help them live on their own.

Every day, there was some type of disturbance. For him, there had never been a moment of rest. Now, things were changing and different from the past.

The worst thing was, he didn't know where he would go from here. He wasn't relieving himself as the Sumeragi head; he would still lead his clan to the next horizon. A sea possibilities and values were waiting to be found. Still, the world moved on in the way it always did outside his window. It would go ahead and time would tick slowly away. Life stopped and then rebirthed itself anew. If the city crumbled then that was Tokyo's business, not his problem. He had realized that the day the Sakurazukamori had showed him what it meant to live without regrets.

Subaru could still appreciate human life for what it was, but he didn't want to be a part of the formula.

So, he waited and watched. He listened as the news reports gathered up. When the police realized he wasn't helping, the phone calls started to get so incessant that Subaru thought the phone would ring off of the hook and tumble to the ground on its own accord. The bangs on his door were worse—all the same, it wasn't his problem to deal with anymore.

Did it prove that everything was about them and their problems? Would Seishirou have said that?

Besides, if Japan's spiritual balance were severed, the Sakurazukamori may break his nonchalance and find him as he dreamed. But even still, Subaru would not wait for a lonely shadow that refused to eclipse the moon in front of him and erase the breath from his lungs. They shared something stronger than a death wish. Yes, he would watch the city burn to ash under the same lens as the Sakurazukamori. Subaru would take refuge in that they had that same vision.


End file.
